An Email Emergency

We recently posted here about the explosion going on inside your email inbox. Virtually everyone is seeing the steady increase in the number of emails that arrive each day from clients, spammers, friends, family, staff, and a variety of listservs that we all subscribe to. The post generated a number of comments, telling me that the email inbox is becoming mission critical for lawyers. If we don’t gain control of our email inbox, our ability to provide client service will be compromised and we could be looking at increased malpractice risk.

Virtually every email inbox has an ability to tag or flag emails. Microsoft Outlook has a flagging system, which allows lawyers to activate a red (or other colored) flag to the right of each email. Of course, the dilemma for every lawyer is whether to stop, read and deal with each email as it comes in or let it go by and come back to it later. Do you let emails pile up in your inbox before going back and reviewing them on a schedule basis?

I use Microsoft Outlook for my email and flag each email that requires action. This allows me to skim emails on a regular basis and flag those that I need to come back to. Microsoft Outlook has a folder called "follow up," which contains all the flag emails. When things are working well, I go back to the follow up folder on a regular basis and deal with all the emails that still require some form of action.

How do you control your email inbox? Give us your thoughts. I will be posting regularly about the email emergency we all face over the next couple of weeks. Other issues that I will talk about include: